The New York Times Advertising & Marketing Solutions Group Introduces nytDEMO: A Cross-Functional Team Focused on Bringing Insights and Data Solutions to Brands

Business Wire 15-Feb-2018 12:36 PM

nytDEMO Powers Brands Using Tools and Insights That Power The
Times; The First in a Series of New AI-Driven Products

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
The New York Timess Advertising & Marketing Solutions Group today
announced the launch of nytDEMO, a cross-functional team that builds
data and technology solutions for brands using the same tools and
insights that power The Times.

nytDEMO -- which stands for data, engineering, measurement, and
optimization -- is a collaboration among members of The Timess
data, product & design, technology, and advertising groups.

We see insights as the next frontier for The Times advertising
business. We have to make a product that's worth paying for, which means
we have to know our audience with extraordinary depth, and turn those
insights into engaging products. Brands that work with us crave insights
to guide their strategies, and The Times can play a critical role
helping them understand what audiences care about now, and will care
about next. said Allison Murphy, vice president, Advertising
Innovation, The New York Times. Weve created nytDEMO, a first of its
kind team, to transform our vast audience understanding into ad products
and tools, inviting brands to tap into our knowledge to drive results.

New Data Products

The Advertising & Marketing Solutions Group plans to launch a number of
new products and tools out of nytDEMO this year, starting with Project
Feels, a data science exploration where the intent is to understand and
predict how emotions and engagement connect.

Project Feels started with the question: does reader emotional response
to our articles influence engagement? A team of data scientists
crowdsourced hundreds of thousands of data points by presenting Times
articles to a wide set of readers to document their emotional responses,
using active learning to identify the most informative articles to
present. The data science team then identified the most meaningful
associations between content, keywords, and emotion using deep learning.
The result was an artificial intelligence model that predicts emotional
response to any content The Times publishes.

Based on the machine learning powering Project Feels, nytDEMO has
launched perspective targeting as a new ad product. Perspective
targeting allows advertisers to target their media against content
predicted to evoke reader sentiments like self-confidence or
adventurousness.

nytDEMO will also soon launch Readerscope, an AI-driven data insights
tool that summarizes what The Times audience is reading using anonymized
data to visualize who is interested in which topics and where
they are.

Readerscope can be used as a content strategy tool to develop creative
ideas for branded content or campaigns by searching a brands target
audience segment (e.g., millennial women) to understand what they're
reading, either as topics or as representative articles exemplifying
those topics. It can also help brands find the right audience or
geography for a certain message by searching a topic (e.g., human
rights, philanthropy or travel ) and seeing which audience segments
over-index for interest about that subject. Topics are algorithmically
learned from The New York Times article archive using state of the art
natural language processing, and all of the reader segments are
targetable with media on NYTimes.com.

These data products grew out of our internal innovations using machine
learning to understand our readers better, said Chris Wiggins, chief
data scientist, The New York Times. Project Feels and Readerscope are
just two of the data-empowered algorithmic tools weve developed, first
as tested prototypes and then, with the help of the cross-functional
team at nytDEMO, as data products that can help The Timess advertisers.

Readerscope will also soon be able to take in brands own first-party
data to create custom segments of these same insights for a brands
specific audience or customer set.

The New York Times Company is a global media organization dedicated to
enhancing society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality
news and information. The Company includes The New York Times,
NYTimes.com and related properties. It is known globally for excellence
in its journalism, and innovation in its print and digital storytelling
and its business model. Follow news about the company at @NYTimesPR.